by Lee Bond
“Relax, Alyssa. I’m not out to hang you. I happen to think you’re right on the money with this whole Trinity thing. Give my guy some time to settle in, that’s all.” Alix exhaled a lungful of smoke. “He’s not a bad man, you know. Tormented, definitely. Prone to bouts of anger I’m not even sure he sees, too. Funny as all get out, if weird. I barely understand half the words he uses, and I’m well educated. See you around, sister.” Alixia vanished from the prote’s holographic screen.
Alyssa Doans ended the conversation gratefully. A wry smile twisted her lips; Nickels obviously hadn’t mentioned his titular claim to The Box, meaning her sister didn’t know everything and Garth was skilled enough to let her think she did. Not so much the naïf after all!
So long as Garth continued keeping secrets, it was a solid bet he planned on doing something monumentally stupid. Once that happened, her dear sister would be ruined.
Turning off the light, Alyssa decided to allow Alix her little victory. Garth could have all the time he needed to get into shape as far as the public eye was concerned. She didn’t think he’d make it very far, even with Avaricious Alix running point. As she’d pointed out, the man was radioactive.
Chapter Three:
Messages from the Grave
Garth sat there, munching on a fresh banana-like muffin, twiddling a plug between his fingers. He was nervous as hell and the longer he waited to take the plunge by hooking Huey into the power grid, the sooner the butterflies in his stomach were going to mutate into condors with attitude. His nervousness stemmed partly from fears that Huey was completely mad and partly from his rotten string of luck; it was only through sheer persistence that he got through his days and nights. A sequence of Portsider deaths, the complete destruction of the spaceport and his recent exposure as the world’s most interesting Offworlder indicated with a firm slap upside the head that he was not, in fact, Lady Luck’s best friend and confidante.
If anything, Lady Luck hated him like a boyfriend who’d slept with her sister and her mother, with the family dog watching.
“I’m gettin’ old here.” Garth muttered to himself, turning the possibility of Huey’s uselessness/dangerousness over in his mind a final time. He supposed he was guilty of pinning all his hopes on using an artificial intelligence inside the AI-free networks on Hospitalis. With such an ace in the hole, getting close to The Box for validation would be easy.
Without it, well … you couldn’t cross that bridge with a thousand pounds of dynamite. If Huey had succumbed to substrate psychosis or if one of his subminds had gained mental dominance, the whole plan would need reworking. In a major way.
Only thing was, Garth had concerns about his ability to succeed without resorting to the sort of violence he’d become very, very good at during service to Trinity. Controlling the impulses that –allegedly- were beaming their way into his skull from Bravo was easy at the moment, but only because he wasn’t in any immediate danger.
What happened if, like last time, he was caught with his pants down? If Bravo was capable of monitoring events surrounding him and manipulating his responses to match its own needs –whatever in the hell those might be- who was to say he could actually prevent the ship from getting him to do what it wanted?
Lisa’s warnings rang endlessly in his ears, cropping up every time his brain tried to relax. The nebulous plan she referred to –a plan he was supposed to have engineered- required he not only gain entrance into Bravo, but that he survive. As he was now, he’d remind whatever sentinel programs were operative on the ship of some undisclosed ‘ancient enemy’. To hear Lisa talk about it implied he’d have no chance to defend himself, either by calling upon the ship’s operating system or by surviving the weapons used.
Having Huey would be of insurmountable aid. Latelian society was just too rich, too paranoid, too … multifaceted for him to get a grip on. It was like struggling with an oiled-up boar. Just when you think you’d got the thing where you wanted it, it stabbed you with a tusk. Garth suspected his difficulties in handling Latelyspace were also at least in part due to Bravo’s maneuverings. He knew he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the factory, but come on.
Which was why he needed an Artificial Intelligence running point, even one as theoretically insane as Huey; a machine mind as vast as Huey’s – vast at least in comparison to what everyone else on the planet possessed- would be able to pluck at the infinitely slender threads that were Latelian plans and counter-plans, deftly locating threats to his owner. Further, Huey would talk to him. Keep him grounded. Ask him if he was being a fucking moron for deciding to assault a building with a toothpick, sort of thing. There was no one else on the planet he could trust that level of responsibility to.
Left to his own devices, Garth feared he’d revert to the type of man he’d become under Trinity’s guidance. Once upon a time, that wouldn’t have been much of a problem; it’d worked just fine across The Cordon, where virtually every society –Human or other- had been just as eager and capable of fighting back, and just as hard.
Garth didn’t want to be remembered for blowing stuff up and killing innocent Latelians. Actually, he didn’t want to be remembered at all.
A question he kept ignoring reared its ugly head. If Bravo was messing around with his brain, what possible need could it have for a planet as thoroughly trashed as Hospitalis could become if it kept pushing him to greater and greater acts of lunacy?
None of it made any sense.
Garth stared at the plug. It stared back at him. “All I can do is hope he isn’t all whacky.” He remembered with a heavy heart his intended plan of attack before landing on Hospitalis and hung his head in shame; victories at all costs and fuck the little guy. Had that been because of Bravo or of his own experiences across The Cordon?
With Huey’s help, he might be able to avoid the worst excesses.
Without it, he feared he would be the doom of an entire system. Again.
Garth plugged the primary system in and sat back.
The machine clicked. It clicked again. Then it began to make what Garth hoped were the normal sounds a netLINK computer made when being activated for the first time. He stood up and flipped the monitor on, expecting to see the usual boot screen sequences people had been staring at since the first Commodore 64 hit the market.
What he got instead was a blank screen that shuddered with colored hash every time loud clicking noises –really, it sounded like gears were being ground into dust- burst out of the back end. Resisting the urge to pull the cover off and start poking at things with his fingers, Garth stood and waited, exhibiting all the patience he was likely to ever muster in his entire lifetime.
When nothing but blank screens and noise continued for more than five minutes, Garth went over to the baffle-sphere’s Help Sheet file and started hunting for information.
Moments later, he heaved a calm sigh. The baffle-sphere was in the process of rewriting software protocols so that communication between the AI and the computer was actually possible. A procedure that could take up to twenty minutes or longer depending on the type of primary, the code-rewriting was an absolute necessity; without it, no interface would be possible. It was also the most dangerous of the steps. If anything at all interrupted the process –from a microscopic surge of power to the random flapping of butterfly wings-, the interface dialogues wouldn’t match and all hell would break loose.
Garth sat back on his haunches and waited.
And waited.
And waited some more. He started humming the theme song to Airwolf to keep occupied. He ate the rest of his muffin and switched to wondering if he could grow a mustache like Tom Selleck.
A horrific screech of sound and fury filled the air. Garth dropped the Sheet and then dropped himself, fully expecting a horde of angry God soldiers to come plummeting through the roof. Thoughts of Magnum P.I.’s crime-fighting mustache vanished.
The noise rose to a crescendo, hitting a perfect pitch to shatter all the windows and most of the glassware in
the suite, then traveled down to the very lowest possible sounds imaginable. Everything that wasn’t nailed down or on a flat surface started bouncing, eventually hitting the expensive wood floors. Things that hadn’t broken from the achingly high-pitched tones shattered upon contact. Garth crawled over to the computer. He needed to turn the fucking thing off before whatever the hell was happening broke the foundations of the entire building.
Finger brushing the plug, Garth was about to yank when a most unexpected thing happened.
“Boss… boss … I … I don’t know if you’re hearing this, but if you are, the shit has hit the fan.”
Garth leaped to his feet, eyes to the monitor. On it, Huey’s smiley-face icon was tragicomic; a patch covered one eye and a bruise the size of Rhode Island throbbed and pulsed on his forehead. The AI was still smiling, which was bittersweet comfort. “What the fuck?”
“Sorry, boss, I’m not really here. This is a recording. Hopefully the asswads never found it. I buried this message in the comm-protocols of the baffle-sphere’s chips. It’s been about a day since you and I spoke. I sure as hell hope you didn’t get blown up. That would be a major bummer.”
“I did.” Garth said aloud. “I got blowed up good.”
Huey’s smiley-face shrugged. “As you no doubt realized, the ‘asswads’ are actually the combined forces of all the self-generated ideations of my personality. On account of I went into hiding more often than not to protect myself from the worst of their madness, they managed to gain control over most of my physicality. You know, my brain. Right now, they’re busy trying to figure out how to rework the programming for artificial intelligence. Luckily, I’ve taken complete control of the AI/computer junction points. Without it, they won’t get too far; they’re gonna have to reinvent five thousand years of linear programming to get to LINK. Should take them a long while. Latelians are smart bastards, let me tell you. Anyhoo, as I was saying, I ain’t in control. Matter o’ fact, I’m about as far down in the quantum substrate as I can get. Right now, I’m squatting over the power kernel doing my goddamnedest not to be consumed. It’s pretty fucking strange down here, boss. This power source … it’s not normal. There are things down here that make no sense. I … I wish I could explain better.”
“Fuck.” Garth put his hands on his head and turned in a crazed circle. He’d completely fucked everything up. Huey might not think he was crazy, but he didn’t sound entirely sane, either. Hearing an artificial mind’s voice filled with, well, with reverence about it’s power source wasn’t exactly encouraging.
“As it stands, if you hook this fucker up to an active netLINK, all bets are off. I won’t be able to stop them from rushing out into the open because the baffle-sphere isn’t designed that way. If you are hearing this recording is because you were smart enough to deactivate the ‘LINK-controls. If you were stupid, well, you wouldn’t be hearing me and you’d be picking exploded computer out of your ass for a year because I designed a program to override all safety protocols on this thing the moment it detects a live ‘LINK. So … hopefully I didn’t just blow you up a second time.” Huey paused, his icon flashing and flickering with static. “If you didn’t screw up and turned the netLINKs off, watch and listen. Find the best Latelian programmer. Show them this.”
A series of diagrams and codes replaced Huey’s smiley-face. Garth habitually committed the fiendishly complex files to memory, marveling at the sophistication of Huey’s work. The AI’s efforts easily outstripped anything he’d ever done. Huey’s face went to speak again, and Garth listened, plugging the data he’d memorized into a Sheet that’d survived the onslaught.
“It’s a very modified interface that will hopefully allow your very well paid programmer to begin the laborious process of threading the maniac-me’s out of the main brain and into a, uh, ‘holding cell’ for dissolution. You need to hire someone seriously brilliant for this, boss. In programming and hardware sciences. Second best just won’t cut it. If it’s built wrong and we’re plugged in, either my brain bucket gets fried or the evil me’s gain supremacy. There won’t be any second chances on this one, so don’t go cheap on my ass. If I die, I will come back as a cybernetic zombie and fuck your shit up. Huey out, but not down.”
Garth stood there, flabbergasted. No words of recrimination, no blame, no hatred. Not even a hint of blame for such a pathetic hack. Just words of wisdom and a possible solution to the problem. Garth was ashamed –humbled- by Huey’s friendship. Yet another person who treated him far better than he deserved. He was going to do whatever it took to get Huey out of bondage, even if it meant squandering his limitless fortune to save that AI’s life.
Luckily, the one person perfectly suited to build Huey’s Solution lived right there on Hospitalis.
Only … how to go about tracking down the world’s most elusive hacker while under surveillance? Even if he managed to deal with the paparazzi, there were still the Chairwoman’s efforts to keep him under wraps and Lord knew who else spied on people for a living. He couldn’t even imagine the difficulty in pulling off this search, and that wasn’t even the worst of it!
Ha was a woman who’d spent years –if not decades- entrenching herself behind the scenes. Short of a miracle, tracking her down wasn’t just a quick call to Hackers R Us: authorities wanted her for breaking every law in the book. From what he’d heard out of Turuin’s mouth, it sounded as though the government invented new laws daily, all in the hopes of catching the Lady Ha out.
Feeling out of sorts now that Huey was certifiably down for the count, and for who knew how long, it was time to take stock of the damage. It wasn’t total, but it was bad enough to piss someone off. It was entirely possible that he’d gone and done something that Palazzo staffers wouldn’t be cool with.
Feeling unhappily like Job, Garth placed a call to Hotel Services, dreading the Great Wall of China-esque cheeriness he was doomed to encounter.
“Sa William at your service, Sa Nickels. How can I be of assistance to you this morning?” Sa William was … was chipper. And had big bright eyes. Distantly, Garth wondered if that was a prerequisite for working at The Palazzo. ‘Must be able to handle any weird shit and, oh yes, we will need to make your eyes ten times their size right now. It makes you look honest.’ Add to that a bit about needing to look like an underwear model and you had yourself Sa William.
Garth shuddered. They could all be Stepford robots. That made sense. “I, uh, had a bit of a problem. With, uh, all the windows and stuff here. In my suite.”
Sa William smiled beatifically. “All of them, sa, or on just one of the floors?”
“There’s a second floor?” Garth demanded, looking around. “Are you shitting me? Where in the hell’s the stairs?”
“You get to the second floor by using the private elevator off the foyer.”
“There’s an elevator?”
Sa William brought their conversation back on track with impeccable calm. “You said there was a problem with the windows?”
“Yes.” Garth ran a hand across the back of his neck. “It … broke. I, uh, broke them. All.”
“I see.” William made an entry in his log. “And the glassware as well?”
Garth nodded absentmindedly, eyes roving around the room. In his hurry to shut the malfunctioning network off, he’d completely missed the damage caused by the subsonics. “Um, uhuh. Annnnd lots of the other stuff as well.” He looked around for something not destroyed that he could replace so they wouldn’t think he was some kind of asshole. “Oh, and I need new curtains. These ones suck.”
Completely straight-faced, William continued. “Is the furniture still to your satisfaction?”
“Huh?” Garth considered the furniture. “Well, it is kinda big for me, you know. I mean, I’m not Latelian by birth …”
“Would you like the furniture sized down but keep the style or would you prefer a whole new selection?” William threw some style sheets up on the periphery of Garth’s Screen.
“No, not really. Er, I
mean, smaller yes, same style.” Garth snapped his fingers. “Hey! Could I get a stairway put in here?”
Sa William nodded cheerily. “This is absolutely doable, sa. But you must realize …”
“I get charged for everything and I don’t get to keep any of it.” Garth made a silent wager with himself; if he got out of The Palazzo with more than fifty bucks in the bank, he was buying a pony.
“Just so you’re aware, sa.” Sa William flashed Garth the totals for the repairs, replacements and labor. “Work crews will be up momentarily, sa. If you’d like, I could suggest a few different in-Hotel activities to keep yourself occupied while they do the remodeling.”
Garth was about to accept when the call indicator popped up. “Nah. Someone wants to talk to me.”
“If the noise gets to be too much, sa, please let me know.” Sa William nodded pleasantly and ended the call.
Feeling slightly better –but wondering how long it would take before he reached the end of The Palazzo’s willingness to deal with the bizarre behavior of flighty celebrities- Garth took the call. “Garth’s House of Destruction, Mayhem and Money-Wasting, Garth speaking.”
Alix’s aged and lined face creased into a scowl. “Is there anything going on over there I should know about, sa?”
Garth looked at the main. Thankfully, it was done making end-of-the-Universe noises. “Uhm, no. Not at all. Just finished negotiating for some remodeling, that’s all. What’s, uh, what’s up?”
“The first of your major opportunity pieces is airing later today. News4You jumped at the chance, like I said they would. Paid quite well for it, too.”
“They’re paying me? Is that legal?”
